In November last year I stated that it would only be a matter of time before it happened. Also in November Joel Webber, a Google engineer had the inspiration to port Quake II to HTML5 from Jake2--a Java port of Quake II--using Google Web Toolkit; the same toolkit used for writing Google Mail | Maps | Wave in Java and compiling into JavaScript. With the help of two other Google engineers (Ray Cromwell and Stefan Haustein) in "20% time", it works! Just!

Microsoft has exposed the COM to expose 'native code' to the internet.

It's called ActiveX and it sucks huge donkey dick. It's just a really bad idea and causes all sorts of horrificly bad things to go on in the web.

I am sure that Chrome's 'native code' is not as horrible as ActiveX (as Google engineers are not huge f-ng morons like the ActiveX architects were), but there is no need to do anything like that.

ECMAscript is ugly and it's not fun, but it's a complete programming language that is just about as capable as any other high-level programming language anybody would care to embed in the browser.

It's now relatively fast with modern JIT compiling technics and whatnot and it's been around, in one form or another, for decades now and is supported and used by not only browsers, but a ton of different applications.

so that is why that if people had a chance to do it all over they would choose something else ecmascript is still a win for web-based applications.